It’s been a long time…

I didn’t realize how much I’d gotten away from posting until I wrote something today that I wasn’t quite ready to publish with Elephant Journal. But more so, I think I’m moving towards a different platform. I’m moving towards a space of writing for myself, not that I haven’t been along, but now it has more of an intention of “by myself, for myself” behind it.

You reach a point in life where you have to decide where you’re going and what needs to change to get there. There comes a time when picking up the pieces no longer makes sense; the puzzle becomes a new chapter and with it, the ability to recreate the entire story line, fresh. That’s not typical of most published stories – there’s continuity, there’s theme, there’s flow.

I’m finding myself standing square in the middle of my story and wanting a radical change. This is my first step in making that change.

XOX!

“Fuck the Pieces. Make Your Own.”

It’s so tempting to try and put the pieces back the same way after everything falls apart. It’s so tempting to scramble and create chaos in a feeble attempt to create some kind of order.

We know that method has never worked. We know it, yet we do it, time and time again.

But then there comes a day…a day when things all of a sudden snap. They break. They shatter, and what we are able to gather from the million pieces of glistening, fragmented glass, even if only for a split second, is truth. We see flashes of things we’d rather not see; revelations about ourselves, our lives, our patterns and defense mechanisms. We see every single way in which we’ve tried to avoid what’s really going on inside.

We see that instead of swimming in our vast sea of sadness, we’ve been doing all we can to walk on water.

Think about that. It’s really fucking difficult to walk on water – impossible, some might say – but we do it. We do it to avoid every bit of emotion that we perceive as a weakness. Every single flare up of vulnerability that we interpret as something that may set us back, hold us down or become the key to our undoing. So we perform miracles and walk on water.

We perform miracles to avoid anything that will make us feel, anything that will break down the strict façade of strength and nonchalant attitudes we attempt to project. We’re crumbling inside, but we’ll do anything to avoid sinking to the depths that will bring us face to face with everything about ourselves that we just can’t face.

Know what though…all of those things we can’t face are our personal pearls. They’re our buried treasures of insight – all of those precious jewels that we deny because we think they’ll be the very keys to our undoing are exactly that, but in the most transformative, miraculous way. We talk about shedding skin and really becoming and being all that we can be, but when we’re too fucking terrified and in too much denial to really examine and accept ourselves for exactly who we are…too put it as raw as possible…we ain’t shit. Seriously – we ain’t fucking shit until we dedicate and commit to ourselves enough to fully explore, discover and accept all that we truly are, perceived weaknesses and pathetic routines and plastic defenses and all.

With this exploration comes chaos, always. There are all sorts of chaos – violent, exciting, invigorating, terrifying. But we see everything through the lenses of our personal perception, so we can choose to see the action of everything we’ve built crumbling as a tragedy. We can choose to see it as the floor going out from under us and our carefully laid foundation giving way.

But foundations were made to be broken and rebuilt. We can choose to see chaos through the lens of desperation and despair while we frantically scramble to put the pieces back together, or we can see it as an opportunity to smash the shit out of everything that has so clearly not been working; if things are falling apart, it’s because something isn’t working. And that something has been built upon and compounded by various other parts that haven’t been working, and in our attempt to make them work, we’ve just added to their instability and faulty design.

When I say faulty, I mean false, because when we find ourselves drowning in a sea of chaos, it’s because we’ve been denying our own vast, raging sea of chaos that’s been calling to us, begging to be excavated so it can be purified. Begging to be seen and acknowledged and most importantly, accepted, so that it too can continue its natural ebb and flow without all the weight of our emotional burdens bogging it down.

If chaos reigns, feed it by becoming it. Become the chaos by shirking the debris that it wants to claim. Lighten your load and give it what it wants, because it’s really here to help.

Accept the help. Accept everything its offering. At the same time, accept everything that you see, everything that’s rising from the depths. These are the true gifts – the mysterious reveals that, in all our self-awareness, we’ve failed to see. The revelations so obvious that we’ve failed to notice. But our failure to notice them doesn’t make them go away; on the contrary, it makes them stronger. It neglects them. It enrages them until they’ve built up enough power to create a tidal wave in the center of our being and completely level all of our plastic defenses.

Then we’re back at square one, which is exactly where we need to be.

Don’t panic. Don’t pick up the pieces. Create new ones, forged with the blood, sweat, tears and wisdom of the past, and build what your soul’s been screaming for…

Our future awaits us in the fragmented wake of our past…will you claim yours?